


Run to the Rock, Run to the Sea

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams and Nightmares, M/M, Memory Alteration, Other relationships not tagged, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 23:31:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1567934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s easy to get lost when everyone looking for him is dead or soon dead. He lays the Mission on the river bank, looks for life signs. The Mission’s chest inflates, deflates, once, again. The wounds in his back and shoulders leak blood, his pulse faint but present. It’s enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run to the Rock, Run to the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many, many shout-outs to Marycontraire and Joatamon for their beta work on this, including numerous rereads and keeping me from my own worst habits. Jo and I will forever be divided by a common language. Thank you to Lastwingedthing and Wuruiqiu for initial reads through as well, and to the lovely nonnies at FFA for their feedback. Any mistakes that remain are my own. 
> 
> Warnings: I struggled with warnings for this, but the best I can determine are effects of programming/deprogramming, PTSD and personality dissociation, and canon-typical violence. 
> 
> Feedback, including concrit, welcome. Feel free to email (dontsleepsharks at gmail) or my ask box on Tumblr (dontsleepsharks) if you'd prefer. 
> 
> Title from Nina Simone's Sinnerman.

It’s easy to get lost when everyone looking for him is dead or soon dead. He lays the Mission on the river bank, looks for life signs. The Mission’s chest inflates, deflates, once, again. The wounds in his back and shoulders leak blood, his pulse faint but present. It’s enough.

The Soldier strips off his tac vest, empties his belt of ammo, throws it in the fast-moving river. He feels heavier, somehow, with these things off.

He keeps three knives, two guns, a length of rope, an old folding knife that he doesn’t remember getting, only that he’s always had it. He spins his compass, picks a direction at random, starts walking. This, at least, is familiar.

He can’t cover much ground, not with Hydra looking for him, not with the world burning behind him. He fiddles with the settings on his arm, gets it to activate concealment mode, most of the arm tinting black, the hand an imitation of skin capped in a fingerless glove. It won’t fool anyone who’s actively looking for him, but most people don’t actively look.

A klick away, and the panic seems to have depopulated this area of the city. A street vendor’s stall, abandoned, displaying sweatshirts, the garish kind with neon lettering on the back. He lifts a plain black one, ducks into a public washroom. A knife through his hair and a scrub with the pink hand soap, and he looks almost like someone else. The sweatshirt hides most of his arm.

A bump on his flesh forearm, enough to be noticeable, a tracker, probably, or the one they want him to find, at least. There are others, he’s sure. He digs it out with a knife. Blood smears the sink. Bleach in a low cabinet in the back, and he leaves the place cleaner than he found it.

He doesn’t run, though he could, just puts boots to pavement again and again until he’s out of the city. It’s full dark when he stops walking, in a manicured suburb he doesn’t know the name of. His body doesn’t demand rest, not yet, but there are streetlights and nosy homeowners likely at the windows. He finds a cemetery, a ditch fresh-dug like a foxhole, wills himself into a half-sleep in the dirt.

First light wakes him, and he wrangles himself out of the hole. Food comes from the dumpster behind a brightly colored restaurant, red and yellow. Ketchup and mustard, he thinks, though he’s not sure where or when he’s tasted those things. He eats.

The first day, he hatches a mark in his arm, walks 50 klicks, and eats three more times. There’s something in his gut that churns in disgust at how much food he finds thrown away - a whole box of strawberries, only one moldy, a carton of milk two days past its expiration date, still cold from the fridge - something older than his programming, maybe, but it passes.

There’s a remote trigger, he knows, some pop in his brain they can activate by distant satellite. He imagines the deep black sleep of the freeze they put him in, stretching on forever.

He waits for death, welcomes it, but it doesn’t come.

 

Five hatch marks and two hundred kilometers later, he’s standing along the road next to a car dealership, ready to boost something from the used lot. He’s eyeing some tin bucket unlikely to be missed and unremarkable in its paint job, when a pickup truck holding three men in the back pulls up next to him.

One shouts in Spanish, slow and accentless, asks if he’s there for work.

“Si, si,” he says. He has no cash; he’ll need it, for what he needs to do, so he hops into the truck.

The men give him wide berth, talking over him. Salvadoran, from the sound of it. He remembers, or thinks he does. Something about a priest, years ago, gunfire at mass. He shakes his head, as if the memory will come to him, but all he gets is that blank, metallic feeling of unknowing, like someone has taken an eraser to his brain and rubbed out everything he’s done.

Their first job is raking leaves, cutting boxwoods into neatly hedged cubes. Early enough in the morning that it’s still cool out, and none of the men say anything other than to lend him some gloves. Those cover his hands, at least. His arm has been quiet since he turned on its camo. It usually hisses and clicks, or makes a faint humming noise, or there’s a light he never found the source of. For now, it’s silent.

They work until the sun is overhead, then go to the next yard, and the next. Dirt cakes his face, and one of the men who says his name is Hector laughs and asks him if he’s trying to blend in.

He shrugs.

“Too tall, anyway, white boy,” Hector says, in Spanish, then laughs when the Soldier doesn’t respond.

They don’t ask him his name. He doesn’t give one.

He passes towns that way, builds a wad of cash that he keeps in four separate stashes, one in his boot, one in his pants’ pocket, one in the compartment in his arm, one tied to the handle of the knife he likes second best.

He stinks enough that he breaks into a Y, showers, leaves a smear of dirt on the floor. He does his clothes in the sink, puts them on still damp. A night custodian finds him, an old man with a limp and a Marine tattoo. He offers the Soldier a meal and a cigarette.

“What do they call you at home, son?” the man asks, handing the him a tin of warmed franks and beans. These, at least, are familiar, though the Soldier flashes a memory of eating them cold, on a riverbank somewhere. Germany, his mind supplies, though he’s not sure when. The fork the man gives him feels unfamiliar; the Soldier is used to eating with his hands.

He shrugs.

“You must have a name,” the man presses, then stops when he sees the fork in the Soldier’s hand, the metal one, concealment flickering ever so slightly, is bent in two.

He puts his arms up in defense. “All right, son, all right,” he says. “At least stay, eat.”

The Soldier lays his fork down, tucks his left hand beneath his thigh, scoops a portion of beans into his hand, and then his mouth, repeats until the can is empty.

“The VA is near here. And a shelter,” the man says. “I could drive you.”

“No,” the Soldier says. It’s probably in English. The man, at least, seems to understand.

“Took me a long time, too,” he says. “When I got back. Fight ends, but the war isn’t over.”

“No,” the Soldier says, thinking of the Mission. “It isn’t.”

There are abandoned buildings in this town, in most of the towns he’s been through. He finds one where there’s some glass left in the windows, climbs to the top, to the pebbled roof. It’s bright enough in the town, the stars are just a smear in the sky. Still, it’s high and cool and clear, and he wraps himself in a blanket he got three towns back.

Just as he’s drifting to sleep, he gets another flash, this one of crowded brick tenements, families sleeping seven to a room, of sleeping two to a bed, of climbing up the hot fire escape at night, sleeping on another distant roof to avoid the summer heat, or on cooler days bundled with - and then the memory has been deliberately been wiped, not smudged like the others, but a specific hole, people with blank mannequin faces, the place and time obscured.

He shudders, and pulls the blanket over himself, and waits for someone, anyone to find him, to end him.

 

It’s two towns away, midday, working on a crew hauling out dead azaleas for some housewife who’s been giving him the eye, when the Soldier sees the man.

He isn’t - it couldn’t be, the Soldier tells himself. Not possible. He’s dead. But then, so is the Soldier by all rights.

The tech in his arm activates, and it’s like pins and needles or maybe that time in Bogotá that he doesn’t remember except he remembers the pain, hot and bright.

He falls forward into the azalea he’s been trimming, retches, once. It’s enough to get the boss’ attention.

“Esta bien?” the boss - Fred - asks, in his flat nasal tone. He’s got a face like a pig, soft hands, but his cash is always good.

The Soldier’s brain whirrs for a minute, through the pain, and into whatever dictionaries they loaded him with. “Fine, fine,” he says, in English, probably, then throws up onto his boots.

He grabs his arm, and Fred moves toward him, maybe trying to comfort him, but it doesn’t matter, because his arm is gripping Fred and he’s tossing him across the yard - into the street, a clean five-meter throw. Fred goes down with a yelp, landing on ass, and for a second, there’s just the thump of him crashing into the pavement, a short, sudden silence.

Then, the other men on the work crew are yelling, and the Soldier is running, now, into the little gap between the two houses, then through a shed he rips the door off and busts through the back of, across a soccer field, and down, down, down a creekbank, boots splashing in the water, again, again, for a klick perhaps, or two, until the creek has widened into a full stream and he can’t hear anything but songbirds and the pounding of blood in his head and the strange clanking in his arm.

The Soldier stands there, hands on his knees, listening for pursuers. There’s pain along his arm, hotter now, like someone has injected him with fire, the kind of pain he can taste in the back of his mouth, in his gut.

It’s almost enough to make him forget the man he saw - almost, but not enough. The man his arm is keyed to: Arnim Zola.

It’s not Zola, of course, or it is him, but it’s not him. He’s wearing a different face, different body, but the arm doesn’t lie - it hasn’t, or if it has, the Soldier doesn’t remember. There’s a lot he doesn’t remember, though. But it’s _him_ , must be.

It doesn’t take much to get a gun. He sloshes up out of the stream, spends an hour drying on the side of the creekbank, sheltered on three sides in case Fred or one of the crew sends anyone after him. Unlikely, given that most of the men probably don’t have papers.

The pawn shop he gets the rifle from doesn’t ask for ID or even a signature, after he offers a wad of cash in exchange for the bolt-action 35 Remington. Instead, the clerk leans over the counter, clicks off a switch, then points to the surveillance camera.

“An extra couple hundred, and I’ll file the serial number,” she says.

The Soldier smiles.

He gets ammo at the next store over, pocketing it as he pays two dollars for a plastic bottle of Coke.

With a mission, his head seems clearer. His arm has quieted now, a steady purr. It’s not hard to track Zola, or the man Zola is wearing, to work, to the bar after work, to the motel where he meets a woman not his wife, to his daughter’s little league games. He drives a Chevy Malibu, 8 years old, once white. He drinks pale beer, eats too much and too quickly, doesn’t seem to exercise.

He looks nothing like Zola - tall, with a full head of red hair that he seems to take great pride in, skinny, despite his drinking and eating habits.

The Soldier watches, and waits. His standard op was four days - two for tracking the Mission, then elimination, extraction. Wipe, deep freeze. That part they didn’t take from him.

On day three, he lies prone for an hour on the roof of the Krispy Kreme, climbing up before the shift workers come to open it. He spends the hour breathing oil fumes, trying to separate grease smell from coffee smell from garbage smell in the dumpsters behind the store. He finds a bag of two-day old donuts in it, eats one, then the next, then the next, until his belly aches pleasantly.

The roof warms as the sun rises; a gentle wind blows from his 9 o’clock. A nice day.

He hears the car approach before he sees it, a dull grayish streak on a gray road. Zola speeds; it’s helpful.

The Soldier braces the rifle against his shoulder, locates the target, or where the target will be, breathes. Fire on the exhale, and then a shot, and another, efficient. He waits only long enough to see the car spin off the road, to hear the thump of the driver’s head against the windshield, like the dull impact of a melon bursting, the screams from customers as the store empties, and five people frantically call for an ambulance.

He takes a breath, then another, works the bolt to collect the casings. He hops from the roof of the Krispy Kreme to the next roof and the next, rolling as he lands each time. No one from the scene has so much as looked up to where the shots came from. A busted tire is indistinguishable from a rifle shot to most civilians. Someone taught him that: Howard Stark, his brain provides, though he doesn’t know when or where.

He fills the rifle with wet sand and puts it off a bridge a town away, into a fast-moving river dark with sediment. The Soldier feels a moment of regret - it’d been a good gun, and he shouldn’t be without a weapon, until he reminds himself he isn’t, can’t be - but he has no time for sentimentality. The casings go in a drain in another town.

More day work, hacking brush, hauling scraps of concrete, a day’s wages for breaking stumps in a cleared field. He doesn’t use his arm much, the humming in it quieter now that he’s had a kill, just feels the ache in the human parts of his back, the calluses on his hand forming in different arrangements.

In some places, there’s a hot meal to go with it, access to running water, a razor. He prefers living rough, though. He sleeps better when he can see the sky.

His arm quiets, but doesn’t silence. It clicks and hums, sends bright flashes like it’s chastising him for picking the wrong random direction from one town to the next. It wakes him now, earlier than light can, an insistent jab in his mind, a tug toward places he’s never heard of, or doesn’t know if he has.

He buys a paper map, lays it out on a picnic table at a rest stop. He stares at it, willing some pattern to emerge out of the scattered dots and lines. He hovers his hand, has a sharp flash of doing this once, with a Ouija board, a bright-haired boy next to him, a darkened room, the eerie sounds of radios through apartment walls. It’s enough to drive him forward onto the table, the force of this sudden clear memory.

His hand lands on a town a few hundred klicks away, fingers unwilling when he tries to move them from the point on the map. It’s as good a place as any.

The railyard isn’t well protected. He climbs the barbed wire fence with ease, metal hand ripping a hole in the wire as easily as candy floss. He pauses, rearranges the wire so that his trail isn’t as obvious.

The trains aren’t running now. He doesn’t need to do much to break into a car, settles across wooden pallets, sleeps. If he dreams of trains, he doesn’t remember it.

A new place, a city more than a town, and this Zola is different. For one thing, he’s a woman. For another, she’s in a wheelchair. He almost doesn’t see her, but his arm goes haywire when she approaches, and if it’s not proof enough for anyone else, it’s proof enough for him. He vomits once, neatly, into a trashcan, then goes to quiet his arm.

He’s a sniper at heart, or at least, that’s what he’s been programmed as. He’ll fight close if he has to, but even the blindest of witnesses will see a man with a metal arm attack a wheelchair-bound woman.

So, he waits.

People on the street give him ample room to pass. He can feel a week’s growth in his beard, the stink that reminds him of battle, shirt crusted white from sweat and salt at the armpits, mats developing in his hair.

There are no shelters here, or none that he cares to find. At night, he hops a fence into the public pool, strips down, bathes in the chlorinated water. He opens his eyes underwater, feels the sting of it, scrubs himself as best he can with his hands, with a bar of soap pocketed from a pharmacy. He dunks his shirt, his pants, sits by the pool until they more or less dry, then stands over a grate on the street to finish the job.

The next day, he watches her.

She’s missing a leg above the knee, the remaining one atrophied. His arm, however, assesses her as a threat, sends a pulse of warning to him when he’s within 50 meters like a fist to the join of his shoulder.

How she is Zola - or why, more precisely - he doesn’t know. Only the hot thrum of his arm when she’s near, the insistence his body seems to have that she is Zola, another, different impulse that he should end her, seems clear.

It’s not a gun this time. A knife instead. He follows her from work, waits until she’s in the elevator, then takes the stairs. Five floors, and his boots echo against the risers, against the concrete block of the stairwell. He’ll need another exit route. 

She doesn’t beg when he cuts her throat. Instead, her eyes flick in recognition when she sees him in the reflection of the far window in her apartment.

“Hail -” she says, possibly. It’s hard to hear her with her mouth muffled by his hand. Blood gurgles when his blade slices through her neck. He sets her so that blood pools away from the front door so it doesn’t seep into the hallway.

He pats her down, nearly gets stuck with a pin protruding from her shirt pocket. He holds it in his flesh hand, feels the point against his thumb.

He wipes his boots against a towel - no doormat here - that he leaves crumpled on the floor as if he was attempting to mop up her blood. He takes the stairs up to the roof, makes his descent from the neighboring building.

There are sirens by the time he’s on the ground. A neighbor, perhaps, or some camera he missed. He’d worn his mask. Being found only means breaking out of whatever cell they put him in or being put down in the process. There are worse ways to go than a double-tap to the head. He can respect its efficiency.

Still, the next day he hops a bus to some out-county suburb, strips and stows his battle gear so that he’s just another bum in a torn T-shirt looking for work in the parking lot of a hardware store.

A crew picks him up, and a few hours later he’s clipping hydrangeas in an impossibly green yard on a bright cloudless day. He remembers a day like this, somewhere, swimming in a river he thought of as only ‘The River,’ a flock of other boys, the sun baking his face and back. It’s one of the memories they took, or tried to take, distant and hazy, like watching bodies move underwater.

Iggy, the unofficial leader of the crew, pushes him aside from where he’s working to pour lime on the soil. “Makes ‘em pink,” he grunts. “Like you.” He gestures the Soldier’s reddened nose and cheeks. “Here’s aluminum for that patch,” he says, pointing across the yard. “Just don’t mix that shit together.”

A break for lunch, and the men all sit bullshitting. Iggy spots him a sandwich, ignores his offer of cash. “I been out a few years,” he says, shrugging. He pushes his Thermos between them. “I know how it was.”

They’re almost ready to move to the next house, when Iggy looks up, smirks at whatever he sees over the Soldier’s right shoulder. “Wildcat’s watching you,” he says.

The Soldier turns to look, sees a woman at the front window, eying him with desire, perhaps, or some facsimile thereof. She’s gone from the curtain a second later, only to appear at the doorway of the house, glass of lemonade in hand.

She gestures at Iggy to come over. “No _inglés_ ,” he says, shaking his head, even if he’s been giving the Soldier a hard time, in English, the whole morning.

She turns her gaze to the Soldier. She’s not tall, compactly built, with reddish hair pulled into a sloppy bun. The way she looks at him appraisingly makes him wary.

“A word?” the woman asks. “Perhaps in a bit more privacy.”

“Buena suerte,” Iggy mutters from behind him. “Might want to do some stretches with that one.”

The men all turn back to their tasks, leaving the Soldier standing on the doorstep.

“Wipe your feet,” the woman says, turning to go into the house. “Just had the floors done.”

He scrapes his feet on the mat, leaves muddy tracks across the front hall anyway.

She leads him down a narrow hallway, which opens into a bright kitchen.

“Lemonade?” she says, and then hits him with two metal disks - stingers, his mind supplies - before he goes blank.

When he comes to, he’s duct-taped to a kitchen stool, his hands free. It’s nothing he couldn’t break free of in half a second, even if his arms feel abnormally heavy.

Interestingly, the woman has another face on. This one he recognizes. The Widow.

Outside, Iggy and the crew have the hedge-trimmers going, loud enough to mask her screaming perhaps. Or his.

She gives him a chilly smile, like she’s thinking the same thing. “Five minutes,” she says. “And a cup of tea.”

She pours from an electric kettle into a glass mug and a chipped cup, gesturing that he should take either. Perhaps neither is poisoned, then, or both are.

He could throw it in her face, burn her or blind her even, and make for the woods behind the housing development they’re in.

“Five,” she says again, in Russian this time.

He shrugs. Five minutes won’t matter, if they decide to kill one another.

They sit and drink tea, a play at civility. The kitchen is pale blue, white trim, copper pans hanging on hooks above the stove, a pot of flowers in the window. His hands leave dark smudges on the countertops when he rests them there. One of his nails has cracked and is healing under the super-glue he’d patched it with. The rest are short and jagged, dirt embedded beyond what soap can touch.

“Sugar?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

She drops a lump of sugar into her own tea. “Thought you were supposed to be Russian,” she says. It sounds almost like a joke.

There’s an exit behind her, a wide doorway with white trim. Another: The window with the flowerpot. He imagines bashing it against her face, the dark soil and blood mixing with the red of her hair.

No matter. She’d seated him with his back to the wall. He could break through it, plaster crumbling like cardboard, if he wanted; his metal arm works even if the other feels leaden. He could smash through her, perhaps. He remembers her garotte, the way she’d wrapped her thighs around his face. She fought like she’d wanted to live. The Soldier can, at least, respect that.

She sips her tea.

“You’re a ghost,” she says, a minute later, but it sounds almost admiring. “A challenge to bring you back in.” She smiles, then, another cold smile, mostly a baring of teeth.

“A game,” he says.

She gives a one-shouldered shrug, a put-on. “Sure,” she says. “If that’s what works for you.” Another sip of tea. “I don’t expect you’ll come quietly.”

“No,” he says.

“I could put you down,” she says, tracing her finger over the rim of her cup. Her nails are short, manicured neatly. “Or the team I have sitting in the shed behind me would.” A bright dot appears on his chest, then. Unnecessary, given infrared sights. A performance piece.

He moves for his knife, the one in his side holster, one of the few he’s kept.

“But I thought we might come to a more amicable arrangement, James,” she says.

“No one calls me that,” he says, reflexively, like he’s quoting something he’s heard a thousand times. “Except -”

“Your mother,” she says. “Yes, James, I know.” She leans forward, talks low like she’s revealing a secret. He avoids her eyes. “The man from the bridge, James, the one who knew you. Would you like to meet him?”

“He lived?” he asks, studying his hands, the counter between them. His voice sounds meek.

“Yes,” she says, reaching for one of his hands, but stopping short. A smart decision. “He lived. Would you like to see him? He would very much like to see you.”

“I -” he begins, “I don’t know.”

“Good,” she says. “Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for. Your cooperation will be appreciated.” She raises her mug like a toast, drains it, then reaches below the table, brings out a set of cuffs, places them between them.

He has his mug in hand, ready to crush it across her face, to put distance between them, but he finds he cannot lift his arms. His limbs feel heavy, not like sleep, but like he’s being put under and he fights, but there’s darkness closing and -

“Never fight fair if you can help it,” she says, and it’s the last thing he hears.

 

The Soldier dreams of icy water filling his nose, mouth, lungs; of the crystals that had formed at the wound site the first time they’d had him in deep freeze; of falling like snow from a train into a deep valley; of a swimming a river in November - a bet, maybe, a dare, the shouts of neighborhood boys with heavy accents disappearing as the water rushes over him.

He wakes up screaming.

His arms - he can’t move his human one much in a leather cuff, and he can’t seem to lift his metal one, too numb to even rotate it. He looks over and sees wires threading into the tubes there, plates open, exposing the lines and gears of his arm. A strap across his chest, almost comically thin, holds him down.

His legs are cuffed down, padded restraints from the feel of it, soft against his ankles. He doesn’t even remember the last time he’d taken his shoes off to do more than shower and check for boot rot.

He blinks his eyes open now, struggles against his restraints until he’s a few inches off the bed. There’s a large mirror, pretty obviously a one-way observation window, a metal stool far out of his reach, nothing else.

He waits.

Something like an hour goes by. His bladder has become urgent; there’s an itch on his left foot he’d like to ignore and can’t. His stomach rumbles.

“I gotta piss,” he says, loudly, conscious of speaking in English, in the direction of the observation window.

No response. He has some memory of spending some amount time this way, an hour, a day, in a basement in Chile. A memory they’d allowed him - or perhaps implanted in him. He didn’t break, then, just broke free from the explosive restraints his captors had put him in. He’d lost part of the metal arm, from the forearm down, bled hydraulic fluid all over the floor, and had completed his Mission late.

For the delay, they’d taken a memory from him, one that’s like a missing frame from a film reel, a blankness where a recollection should be. He’d wept after they took it, though he hadn’t been sure why.

Later - a few minutes, maybe - the door opens, and the Widow enters. She holds a syringe in one hand. “Sorry,” she says, sounding perhaps honestly apologetic, but injects him anyway, a quick shot to the side of his neck.

The world goes fuzzy, but not dark, and his tongue feels suddenly bigger in his mouth. He dials through the dictionaries he knows, but words feel farther away, harder to summon.

“Was that necessary?” a voice asks, and the Soldier can’t move enough to see who it is.

“You know it was, Steve,” the Widow says, voice soft.

“Is he -” Steve asks. “I mean, does he -?”

“He’s killed two people,” another voice says. “One was in a _wheelchair_.”

“I know. I hear you,” Steve says. “But he’s not killing anyone like this,”

He hears the sound of something, the stool probably, being dragged across the floor. The man from the bridge comes into his field of view.

“Hey, buddy,” he says. “Remember me?”

It sounds like a joke he should be in on. “From the bridge,” he says, and his voice sounds rusty. “And the river.”

“You saved me,” the man says. “Steve,” he says, almost an afterthought. “My name is Steve.”

“I -” the Soldier says, but he doesn’t know what else to say.

“It’s OK,” Steve says. Then, slowly, reaching for the Soldier’s flesh hand, gripping with strong fingers at his palm. “It’ll be OK, Bucky.”

The Soldier winces at the name. It sounds like something he was called, once, familiar in Steve’s mouth. He could withdraw his hand, even with his movements limited by the restraints, pull away in some small show of defiance. He doesn’t.

“Could you give us the room?” Steve asks.

“No,” the Widow says.

“Steve,” says the other man in the room, a little pleadingly. He’s the other one from the bridge, the one with the wings.

“We got him strapped down and drugged to the gills. I don’t think he could hurt me even if he wanted to.”

“ _If_ ,” says the flying man.

“I’m not asking you to leave the building, Sam,” Steve says, standing now. “Just the room. Matter of fact, I’m not really asking, either.”

The Widow leans over the Soldier’s bed now. “We’ll be outside,” she says, more to him than to Steve.

Once they’ve left, two sets of footsteps and the door thudding closed, Steve sits again, pulling the stool close, knees almost against the Soldier’s body. “Hey,” he says, as if he’s greeting a friend.

The drugs the Widow gave him must be wearing off or really kicking in. His vision feels clearer, sharper, the over-bright fluorescent lights pricking tears from his eyes. He tries to shake his head, and Steve brings his hand to the Soldier’s face.

“You’re safe now,” Steve says, and there’s something in his face - anger, pity, some other expression the Soldier doesn’t recognize - that has the Soldier snarling, twisting his neck as far as it will turn, trying to get teeth across Steve’s hand, to draw blood.

“Hey, hey,” Steve yells, pushing the stool back. It falls with a clatter. He waves his arms, not at the Soldier but at the observation window. “It’s OK,” he says to it. He sits. “Let’s try again.”

He sits further away this time, hands on his knees. “Are you thirsty?” he asks. “Hungry?”

“Gotta take a leak,” he growls.

“Yeah, OK,” Steve says. He leaves, leaving the door open, revealing only a bare hallway, comes back a minute later with a bedpan. “If I free your arm - your real one - you promise not to do anything stupid?”

The Soldier nods an assent.

Steve maneuvers the pan between the Soldier’s legs, leans and undoes the buckle of the restraint. “Your arm’s rigged to explode if you disconnect those wires,” he says. “So, um, don’t.”

There’s the window to his left, and Steve to his right. It’s easier to move right. The Soldier grapples with the buttons on his pants. Button-flies for snipers, quieter than zippers; some things don’t change. He has a flash of doing this years before, in a foxhole, pissing while lying sideways, a beautiful countryside over his shoulder, the soothing sounds of mortar-fire exploding in the distance.

Steve turns his back, a show of privacy the Soldier has little use for.

He shakes off when he’s done, rebuttons.

Steve removes the bedpan, serene as if he’s carrying a vase of flowers. He returns with a hunk of bread, water in a plastic cup. “Eat,” he instructs.

The Soldier does, drains the cup of water without being told.

“Now,” Steve says, and he sits on the stool, a little closer. He makes no move to rebuckle the restraint. “Why’d you kill those people?”

“Zola.”

“Zola told you to kill those people,” Steve asks, incredulous.

“They _were_ Zola,” the Soldier snaps.

“They were - how?”

He shrugs, as much as he can with his arm in the restraints.

Steve sighs, wipes a hand across his face. “How’d you find them?”

“The arm.”

“The arm told you how to find them?”

Another shrug.

“I’ll - I’ll be back, Buck,” Steve says, and the Soldier curls a lip at that name.

There’s the sound of Steve walking in the hallway, then a murmur of voices.

He’s alone long enough that he drifts, not to sleep, but to the mind-space he went into when waiting for a kill, a conscious unconsciousness, counting the beats between breaths, the flick of the lights above him, moving his toes, then his feet and ankles, slowly, not enough make noise, just enough to keep blood flow. He studies each corner, the sealing around the window, the legs of the stool Steve was careful to leave out of his reach.

He’s counting the ceiling tiles when Steve returns. The Widow is with him.

“You’re going to tell me about Zola,” she says. “You’re going to tell me about your arm.”

She sits on the stool, legs wide, hands on her knees, waits.

He doesn’t look away or down or back up at the flickering lights on the ceiling. He remembers what happens when he doesn’t listen. It’s one of the memories they let him keep.

“Bucky,” Steve says, after a minute. “Tell her.”

The Widow must see his grimace at that name. She puts up a hand to silence Steve.

“What would you like to be called?” she asks. “It’s best we decide on something.”

“He _has_ a name.”

“Cap,” the Widow says, a warning. “I’ll start. I’m Natasha.”

“Natasha,” the Soldier repeats.

“Yes,” she says. “And you’ve met Steve. That’s Sam, in the observation room. I probably don’t need to say we’ve had weapons trained on you since we brought you in. Sam’s ready to roll if we need him to.” There’s a thump on the glass from the other room, a reminder. She smiles, gives the window a little wave. “Now, what should we call you?”

“Asset,” he says. It’s what they’d called him, when they called him anything.

“No,” Natasha says, shaking her head slightly, dismissively. “We were all assets. Something else.”

“James,” he says. It’s as good a name as any.

“James, then.” Her voice is light. “Tell me about Arnim Zola. Tell me about your arm.”

“I have a Mission,” he says. “You’d stop me.”

“Looks that way,” Steve says. He gestures to the restraints still securing the Soldiers’ legs, the wires in his arm.

“But, if what you’re telling us is true, that would be something we would be interested in. Perhaps something … mutually beneficial,” Natasha says.

He thinks about the soldier behind the glass, ready to put his brains on the ground, the rigs in his arm, the dark empty hallway outside the room. He could limp out of here, no arm, no face, even, but to what? A Mission without his arm. He can’t. 

“OK,” he says. He relaxes a little, stops feeling the press of the restraint strap against his chest. “OK.”

Natasha doesn’t smile, despite Steve’s wide grin behind him. Probably a good sign. “Thank you,” she says. “For your cooperation.” She rises, moves the stool back, out of his reach. “Enough for today.”

“We should -” Steve says.

“Probably get him cleaned up. A decent meal wouldn’t hurt either.” Sam enters the room, hands a gun to Natasha, too quickly for Bucky to see its make. “If he’s going to be any use, we probably need to get that ‘back from the sandbox’ funk off of him. And some weight on.”

“Lemons,” Natasha says. “They help. For the smell.”

“Probably should hose him down for the first go,” Sam says. “Is there a drain in here?”

“We’re not going to - he’s a person,” Steve says.

“That can kill you with a shampoo bottle, never mind a razor.”

Steve moves toward the Soldier, hovers over him, nose curling a little as if he’s noticing how James smells for the first time. “You promise not to … you won’t do anything stupid, right? If we let you up?”

“Arm’s still wired to blow, yes?” he asks.

Steve nods.

“I’ll -” the Soldier says. “You won’t have any problems with me.”

Sam throws up his hands. “Your funeral, Cap,” he says. “Or probably all of ours.”

Eventually, they - Steve, and Sam - loosen his restraints.

Natasha fiddles with the wires in his arm so that he can move it again, somewhat, even if it feels useless and heavy as wood.

Sam makes a point of noting the four explosive devices sitting in his arm. “Don’t think Cap can help you either. I heard about that electrical panel on the Helicarrier.” He says the last as if the Soldier should know what he’s talking about.

“Can you walk?” Steve asks, well, more breathes into his ear as he reaches to undo the last strap holding him down.

He shrugs.

They half-carry him out, down the hallway, into a room with a communal shower, a row of shower heads protruding from one wall.

“Do you want these clothes back?” Sam asks, though it’s obvious from the way he says it what the answer should be. They’d taken his battle gear, his knives and boots, anyway.

He strips, as quickly as he can, given that he can’t move his arm much. Steve reaches over and tugs at his shirt when it gets stuck on his arm.

The water is hot enough to burn at first. The Soldier doesn’t care. They give him shampoo, and he scrubs his hair, once, twice, a third time. He goes for a fourth when Steve says, gently, “Enough - probably gonna have to cut it anyway.”

His body is next, and the soap turns almost black in his hands. They don’t give him a washcloth until his second time scrubbing all over, but he goes a third time, getting his armpits, behind his balls, between his toes. Another rinse, and the water’s beginning to turn cold.

“Buck - James,” Steve says. “Water’ll reheat in the morning.” He turns the tap off, hands James a towel, a set of clothes.

He feels more naked in a T-shirt and soft pants than he did when he was actually naked. He shivers, once, not from cold, just from the feel of cloth against his skin.

“Probably should get some hedge trimmers to deal with that hair,” Sam says. “And a vat of Listerine. That breath is foul.”

“Tomorrow,” Steve says. “Are you hungry?”

He is.

Back in the observation room, the table he was lying on has been replaced by cots, two of them, a low camping table with two stools, food.

There are white containers with metal handles, plastic plates and forks.

Steve sits, grabs a package of something in waxed paper, hands one to him. “Eat,” he says.

It’s some kind of fried thing that crunches between his teeth, leaves his mouth greasy. He dips it into a cup of orange sauce, swallows it in three bites.

“Slow down,” Steve says. “Gonna give yourself a stomach ache.” He laughs, somehow, at that, especially when the Soldier starts chewing more carefully. “You used to say that to me all the time.”

He shrugs.

“You really don’t remember?” Steve asks, around of mouthful of food.

He tries to remember, but sorting through the file of his memory is like trying to sort through something redacted, half-burned. “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s, uh, it’s fine.” Steve’s face says otherwise.

After that, they eat in silence. The food is good, if too salty, and the plastic fork frustrating, especially on slippery noodles.

Steve watches him struggle, then pushes a container of chicken, another of rice, toward him.

The Soldier grasps some rice in his hand, then a piece of chicken, brings it to his mouth. He looks up to find Steve watching him, his expression unreadable.

“You really don’t remember, do you?” Steve says, like he’s just now realizing it, like he has somehow been acting this whole time. “Brooklyn, the war, the train, nothing.”

Another shrug. He could pretend. It’s not hard. They’d somehow wiped his brain, but left his skillset, the muscle memory of how to grip a knife, how to calculate wind speed to adjust his shot, how to evade capture, to lie if caught. He thinks about smiling, patting Steve on the shoulder, saying, “Call me Bucky,” nodding as Steve recounts Brooklyn.

He does none of these. The Soldier could, would, but he, _James_ , isn’t so sure. 

It’s warm in the room, and James finds himself blinking to keep his eyes open. He scrubs a hand over his face, the stubble there softened from shampoo, has to keep in a yawn.

“I’ll go get a pillow, some bedding,” Steve says.

James pushes himself away from the table, goes to settle on the far cot next to the observation window. He wonders if Steve will sleep on the other; it seems foolish of Steve, sleeping near a man who’s tried to kill him. It seems foolish for James to sleep now, here, as a captive. He feels heavy, exhausted, like his bones are made of lead. He doesn’t have much time to consider this, though, before his eyes close, and he’s faded into sleep.

When he wakes again, the lights are on, there’s a blanket covering him from neck to feet, a pillow by his head, and Natasha sitting on the other cot, examining her nail polish. “Good morning, James,” she says. “Feeling talkative?”

They don’t seem interested in talking though, or in interrogation. Sam clips his hair and beard short. “Hope you don’t mind the number four. I’m a soldier, not a barber.” He laughs at that, then says, “Just tell Steve add it to the list,” when James gives him a blank look. He walks James to the showers, waits outside the room while James washes off the buzzed hair.

Breakfast after, another meal with Steve, this one with coffee, more of it than he ever remembers drinking at once. “Different from the stuff we used to make from chicory, huh,” Steve says. It’s not really a question.

Natasha comes in then, bearing what looks like a ream of print-outs. “Probably should get you caught up,” she says. “Steve thinks an education is part of the recovery process.” Her tone, however, is skeptical.

The history she gives him, or the heavily edited version of it, seems like something from a movie, too impossible to have actually happened. He reads until his head swims, then listens as Natasha recounts the end of the war, the rebuild after. Her voice is even, dispassionate, about the Cold War, Civil Rights, the anti-war movement, the Nixon era.

He gets to the US actions in Cambodia when he has to tell her to stop. “OK,” he says. “Enough.”

“Do you remember -”

“No,” he says. “It’s just, it’s a lot. Never was much for school.” And her eyes flick to him when he says it. He doesn’t know how he knows, just that he does.

She presses her lips in a thin line, her real smile, perhaps. “You’re right,” she says. “Enough for today.”

Sam next, and they sit in the observation room, Sam drinking coffee, while James attacks his nails with a clipper and metal file. It’s the closest thing to a weapon they let him have, and Sam is careful to stay in his eyeline, even when he’s trimming his toenails over a trashcan.

“Lucky you didn’t end up with foot rot,” Sam says, taking a swig of coffee from a paper cup with a cardboard band around it. “I think we’re gonna have to burn those boots.”

He doesn’t say much after that, just sits and waits for James to be done.

That first day, they don’t show him maps, don’t ask about his arm, about Zola. He’s handed between them at regular intervals, and patterns begin to emerge: He eats with Steve, and only Steve, always the two of them together and alone. Natasha talks more at him than to him, about the world as it is now, or the world they want him to know about. Sam is the opposite, quick to laugh but wary, with long stretches of quiet that he appears to be waiting for James to fill in.

The next day is the same, more history with Natasha, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contra scandal, the various actions in Latin America, the Wall coming down. She looks to him after each, as if waiting for him to somehow remember. She has a tell, a slight hitch in her voice when talking about a coup or an assassination, something where James suspects he’d been involved. It’s probably purposeful, a subtle reminder that this is who he is; Natasha doesn’t seem to do much by accident.

Where Sam is quiet and Natasha expectant, Steve seems at a loss. He eats fast - soldiers always do - even though they seem to have blocked off an hour on his schedule for each meal, so they just sit and look at each other. Or James looks at his hands, feeling Steve’s gaze on his face.

“Thank you,” Steve says, abruptly, toward the end of the meal. “For getting me out of that river.”

“You’re, uh, welcome,” James says. He hadn’t thought about it much at the time, too high on the thrill of battle, newly rescued by the Mission - by Steve - the ship crashing around them. It made sense to leap, to pull him from the water.

“You saved my life,” Steve says.

“You saved mine,” James says.

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve says, face contorting, and then Natasha is in the room, shooing Steve out.

They have a conversation in the hallway James can only hear snatches of. “He’s not ready,” Natasha says. “ _You’re_ not ready.”

Sam comes in then, escorts him to a third room, this one some kind of training room. “Can’t let you get fat on all that takeout,” he says. He guides James through a series of stretches, not quite calisthenics, but take enough of his concentration that he can’t focus on doing much else.

He can’t balance well on his metal arm, and he shakes as he tries one of the bends Sam does, almost topples over onto one of the blue mats. It’s funny, somehow, and he laughs at himself, laughs harder when Sam reaches over and offers a hand up, though he’s careful to reach for James’ flesh hand.

“You good, man?”

“Yeah,” James says.

He sleeps in the observation room that night, or tries to. His dreams now are more vivid than they were when he was on the move, still disordered, but closer somehow. He dreams of walking, being shot by an unseen observer from a great height again and again; of drowning; of falling forever into an inky blackness, praying for an impact that never comes.

He wakes to Steve shaking his ankle. “You were screaming,” Steve says.

“Oh,” he says. His throat feels sore.

Steve hands him a cup of water. He drinks.

“Did you -” Steve begins, then stops. “Would you tell me about it?”

“I …” but James doesn’t know where to start, how to take the images his brain gives him and make sense of them, how to fill in anything when he finds more and more missing. “Sleep easier outside,” he says, finally.

“We, uh. I used to do that, in Brooklyn,” Steve says. “It got so warm in the tenements. I’d climb up to the roof and camp out there. Even up there, it’d be hot enough to fry an egg, and there’d be that smell coming off the river. But it was less like trying to sleep in an oven.”

Something clicks inside James’ head, some memory of the same, though when he tries to recall it exactly, it becomes like a wisp of smoke, tenuous and impossible to hold. “I think,” he says. “I think I remember that, somehow.”

Steve smiles wider than James has ever seen him, enough that his teeth practically glow in the dark. “I’m glad,” he says, after a minute. “Really glad, James.”

The cooling system kicks in, then, a whirr of noise like the building breathing. “Sleep better with noise, too,” James says.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “City habits die hard.” He’s sitting on the cot next to James’. There’s a blanket there, a second pillow.

“You gonna stay?” James asks.

“I can.”

“OK,” James says, and turns on his side, so that he’s facing away from the window and toward Steve’s cot.

“Good night,” Steve says. James listens as he settles in.

He wakes up screaming again, this time a dream about blurred hands in the dark, a rubber bit in his mouth, men with knives and stun guns. Steve is there, though, shaking his ankle when James comes up swinging, a hand on his face after, more water. He sleeps easier after that.

James accumulates possessions, slowly at first, a stick of deodorant, a bristled hairbrush, then enough that a low table appears, a few boxes for storing his clothing. They give him nothing with an edge, of course: He receives and returns a safety razor to Sam each day. No belts or strings or laces in his shoes, just a pair of shower slippers that slap against his feet as he walks. A diary too, a gift from Steve one day over lunch, blank pages he doesn’t know how to fill. A pencil with a dull tip.

He gets three meals a day, a few books Steve said he’d read, even if he doesn’t remember, a wireless that plays music he’s never heard before, things Steve says helped him get caught up to the present. (“An iPod,” Sam explains. “A speaker dock.”) It runs on batteries and Natasha confiscates it every so often to recharge it.

With the window, he feels like a zoo exhibit or a pet or a mental patient, which is pretty much what he is. Days pass, and then a week. He can’t remember the last time he had so much to eat or clean clothing every day. They don’t ask him about his arm. They don’t ask him about Zola.

 

He wakes up one night, disoriented, metal taste in the back of his mouth, blood in his head going. There’s no light, but the Soldier has always moved better in the dark. Limited cover. He turns the cot, lies behind it in a sniper’s sprawl. He feels for a sidearm, a knife, even something as paltry as a trench-tool or a fork. He has no weapon. His arm is a useless hunk of tin at his side. He has no weapon.

There’s some kind of rumbling outside - mortars? If so, distant ones. More like the sound of tanks moving, treads digging up earth. He can kill a man if need be, bare-handed. He’s done it before. He makes the mistake of glancing over his shoulder: Who the fuck builds a cell with a window in it? He turns the cot, assumes the position furthest from the door, listens to his blood pound as he waits, loud in his ears.

The door opens, a figure backlit there, a spill of light from the hallway. He can’t see the figure’s face, but it doesn’t matter, he’s up with the plastic feet of the cot, goes full force, pushing off the wall.

“What the -? Oof -” the man says as he goes down to the floor. The Soldier fights with his fists and knees, an elbow to the side. But the man is strong, stronger than anyone he’s faced before. Quick, too.

The Soldier feels soft, out of practice, sluggish. He’s down faster than he’d admit, and they’ll really give him hell for this, a day in the chair, two probably, waking up retching as they take memory after memory. He tries to spin, arch up, but his assailant has arms like iron around him, a leg across his, in a sleeper hold.

“Calm down, James,” he says. “James, easy. I’m trying not to hurt you. James.”

The Soldier twists his head, bites the man, hard, on the exposed interior of his elbow.

“Goddamn, it, _Bucky_!” An arm at his neck now, cutting off his breathing, and the Soldier feels himself giving one final kick before he passes out.

He comes to on his cot. His neck is sore, bruises beginning there surely, and he blinks at the lights now on in the room.

Steve sits at the little table, sipping something amber from a clear plastic cup. “Is that -”

“Whiskey,” Steve says. “Can’t get drunk. But it helps.”

“Can I?” James asks.

“Probably shouldn’t,” Steve says, but he’s tipping some into a second cup, the one James usually drinks orange juice out of in the mornings. He hands it to James.

“Had the same problem a few times when I first woke up,” Steve says. “Didn’t know where I was. They, uh, had to tranq me a few times to get me down.”

“Guess I’m lucky, then. Thanks for the chokehold,” James says, and there’s something about this, about drinking at 4 A.M. by the clock on the wall, about the way Steve looks at him, tired, but there, that makes him add, “pal.”

Steve shrugs, but offers a small grin. He holds his whiskey in both hands, palms dwarfing the cup, and James flashes to him doing that, long ago, with smaller hands, the first real memory where he can see Steve’s face.

“What’d you dream about?” James asks, before he can stop himself.

Steve’s expression falls a little.

“Never mind. Sorry. Stupid question.”

“No, it’s ..” Steve says. “It’s fine. The war, mostly. I died in the water. Not that so much as before that. You. Peggy. Before I got,” and he looks down at himself, “like this.”

“Do you still?”

A shrug. “I don’t think it goes away completely. Some nights it’s good - we’re all together, fighting Nazis or out in Brooklyn. Once,” and he actually blushes, “it was just me and Peggy dancing the whole time.” He picks up his cup, gives the whiskey a swirl. “Talking about it helps. Sam taught me that.”

“Don’t know if I’m ready, yet,” James says, honestly.

“First you get mad, that’s the first sign you’re ready,” Steve says. “I was steaming. They had me in a room like it was the ‘40s, listening to a Dodgers game on the wireless. A game I’d been to. Had me stuck there like I didn’t deserve the truth. I woke up and was out of the building before they could catch me, lickity-split. Ended up barefoot in the middle of Times Square, all those insane lights. The noise. Then came the missions - felt like they defrosted me just to make me a sideshow again for a while, everything but the spangled tights. And the Dodgers moved. To _Los Angeles_.”

He says the last with such disgust that James can’t help but laugh; he has to hang on to his cup to keep the whiskey from sloshing out of it.

Steve looks surprised for a few seconds, confused by James’ reaction, then laughs too, loud, hand smacking the table.

“What a pair we make,” James says, a minute later, holding his sides.

“Yeah,” Steve says, his own laughter quieting. “Always did.”

A pause, and they both contemplate the whiskey at the bottom of their cups. Steve takes a swig of his. “Think you can sleep again?” he asks.

“Maybe,” James says. “Would it be - could I go outside? For a minute?”

“I’ll - I’ll talk to Natasha,” Steve says.

They strap an ankle monitor on him. “Tracker’s already in place,” Natasha says, gesturing vaguely at James’ neck.

“So what’s this for?”

Natasha gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Reminder.”

Steve joins him as they walk up a long set of open-grate stairs. Natasha leads, then James, then Steve, carrying two mugs of coffee. The safe-house they’ve been staying has a wrap-around porch, low roof on it. It overlooks a wide green yard, a path through it sloping to what James assumes is a road.

There’s a sun-faded couch, cushions sagging. Steve sits, gestures for James to sit beside him. He throws a blanket that, somehow, smells like straw and wet dog, across both their legs.

“I’ll take the roof,” Natasha says, shimmying up one of the porch columns easily.

It’s not light yet, but birds are out already, the air cool and wet.

They sit, Steve easy at his side, the heat from his body warming James. It feels like a long time before the sun rises.

“This is a defensible position,” James says, after a while.

“Especially since Natasha and Sam mined the front lawn,” Steve says, taking a sip of coffee.

“HYDRA?”

“Or whoever,” Steve says. “If you can’t tell, we’re sort of hurting for friends right now.”

“I think -” James says. “I think I’d like to talk to Natasha. About my arm. About Zola.”

“Thought you might.”

“In a minute, though,” James says. “I want to see it get full light out.” He gestures with his cup toward the sun at the horizon.

“Of course,” Steve says, and he brings a hand to clap James’ thigh, once, twice, before finally resting it there. “Of course.”

After breakfast, they lead him to a room he hasn’t been to before. There are files, a board with pictures, maps. “Just because you’ve been still doesn’t mean we have,” Natasha says, at his questioning look.

There’s a map of the state spread out on a table, black pins in it where his previous hits had been. “The red pins are for where you were staying,” Sam says. “The yellow ones are for where we think Hydra is operating from.”

“DC?” James says.

“Was a strike against them, for sure,” Sam says. “But it’s like a cancer. You cut the main part out and you get other cells activating, going rogue.”

“We’ve tracked their activity to a few places. Nat obtained intel about where they might rise next- ” Steve says.

Sam interrupts him. “But we haven’t got - I mean, there’s been no indication of anything about Zola.”

“You think I’m lying,” James says, crossing his arms as best he can across his chest.

“Not what I said,” Sam says. “We just haven’t gotten any corroborating intel.”

“That’s where you come in.” Natasha seats herself at a chair by the table with the spread map. “We were hoping you could provide some insight as to Zola’s motives, his work.” She gestures to his arm. “We’ll have to activate it, though.”

James grimaces. His arm had been silent since they’d wired it against him, sending neither pain nor the soothing feelings of when it had a fresh kill. He’d gotten used to its silence, the trust it’d bought him.

“We need to know a few things, though, before then.”

James sits in a chair opposing hers. If this is to be an interrogation, he’ll treat it like one.

“Steve, would you mind excusing us?” Natasha says, voice light.

Steve appears to hear it for the non-request it is, and leaves them.

Sam doesn’t sit, instead leaning against an area on the board not decorated with information on the other Zolas. He keeps his arms by his sides, expression neutral.

“Tell me about your arm,” she says. “About how it works, about what it tells you.”

“I -,” James says. “I don’t really know. They didn’t tell me much. How to repair it on a Mission, concealment. Not much else.” It’s ridiculous, now that he says it out loud. A soldier should should know his weapon; he doesn’t remember learning any of his guns, just knows he can disassemble and reassemble them in the dark, one-handed, if need arises. Like a part of his own body. But for his arm, there’s a blank spot in his memory, one he’s learned to recognize as a purposeful erasure. “I think they didn’t want me to know.”

“Let’s review what you do know,” Natasha says. She has a pad of paper out now, a pen. “How did you find,” she pauses, takes a delicate sip from a water bottle that sits sweating on the table. “The first Zola?”

“He found me,” James says. “Or the arm directed me, but I didn’t notice.”

“How does it direct you?” Sam asks.

“Pain,” James answers. “Or something, I don’t know. Like the absence of pain. If I do something it likes.”

“You talk about your arm like it can think, like it’s part of you, but isn’t,” Sam says.

“Like your wings?”

“I know who’s doing the steering with those. Not sure about you.” Sam inclines his head. “We’d like to find the next one, if there is one. Recon only. No kills.”

Natasha turns on a projector then, painting the back wall with a map. “Do you think you can find them?”

James considers for a minute, but the map remains a tangle of meaningless lines, towns he’s never heard of. His arm is a dormant weight at his side. He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Not unless it’s activated.”

“We’ll need to think, then,” Natasha says. “About how we care to proceed.”

“You mean, if you can trust me not to kill all of you if the arm turns back on?” James says.

“Something like that,” Sam says.

“I wouldn’t,” James says. “You’ve been -” And he struggles to think of an appropriate word for their actions, the mixture of constant care and standing threat. “Kind,” he finally settles on.

“You wouldn’t,” Sam says. “Can you speak for the arm, though? For you, if your memory slips?”

“No,” he says, honestly.

“As for the arm,” Sam says. “Why is it going after Zola? HYDRA isn’t exactly known for its loyalties, but why eliminate an asset like that.”

“I -” James starts. “I’m not sure it’s the arm. It finds them. Eliminating them feels … different.”

“Interesting,” Natasha says, lightly. “You’ve given us a lot to think about.”

James sags in his chair, leans forward, puts his face against his flesh hand. “Either of you guys got a cigarette?”

Sam laughs, then, sudden. “That shit’ll kill you,” he says. “I’ll put some on the list next time someone makes a grocery run.”

“Ask Steve,” Natasha says.

He’s dismissed then, the first time he hadn’t been actively handed-off between them, even though Steve is lurking outside the door when he leaves the room. “I hear you might have a cigarette,” James says.

Steve looks vaguely abashed. “I thought you might want one,” he says. “When you woke up.”

He smokes out on the porch, ashing onto a saucer painted with flowers. He coughs on the first few draws, feeling unfamiliar, has to spit once to clear his throat.

Steve sits near him, upwind from his smoke.

“Old habits,” James says, lighting his second cigarette off his first.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Easy. You’re gonna end up with sore lungs.”

He waves a hand to dissipate the smoke. “Aw, stop fussing,” he says, a little teasing, mostly for the way it makes Steve smile back at him.

The next few days are spent in a familiar pattern - waiting for orders from someone who will decide his next move for him. This, at least, is familiar. He trains with Sam, not just stretches but light sparring too. An indication of a Mission, or at least that they don’t want him to rust quite yet.

Twice he wakes up screaming, Steve there with water, once a cigarette on the porch. “Don’t tell, Nat,” Steve says, but of course she knows, gives them both a reproving look the next morning.

Once he can’t sleep at all, just spends the hours between his lights-out and wake-up call counting spots on the ceiling tiles, growing increasingly agitated when his mind refuses to calm, like a radio scanning and scanning without settling on a station.

Another day, he can’t think in English, switching from Russian to French to a language he doesn’t even recognize, though he seems to speak it fluently.

“Pashto,” Sam identifies. “We can work on it some time. If you’d like.”

They’re playing chess together, another of Sam’s suggestions. Sam is a thoughtful player, deliberate and decisive. He mounts subtle, careful attacks, stripping James of his rooks and knights before going after his queen. Steve lets James win half the time, and Natasha refuses to play.

“You sleeping alright?” Sam asks, as he takes one of James’ pawns.

“No,” James says.

“Good,” Sam says. “That you’re saying that. Truth is more important than recovery, for the moment.”

“I’d take sleep right now,” James says. He advances a pawn, carelessly, realizes he’s left his bishop defenseless once he’s taken his hand off the piece.

“Sleep’ll come,” Sam says. “When I got back I only slept days, one to three, four to six, only on the floor next to my bed, back to the wall. Sometimes in the bathtub, if things got bad. Looked like a zombie for weeks.” He leans back, considers the board in front of them. “Your move.”

“Yeah,” James says. “Fair enough.” He toys with one of his pieces. “You talk about these things with Steve?”

“Sometimes,” Sam says. “But mostly not. Steve’s my friend.”

“We’re not friends?”

Sam looks a little abashed. “I don’t just do yoga with anybody. But right now, no. I like knowing my friends won’t shoot me in the back if they get the chance. You’re more … a work in progress.”

“A project,” James says. “An asset.”

“If that makes you happy, sure,” Sam says. “Natasha’s job was to bring you in. Mine is to assess your sanity.” He shifts in his chair, leaning back. “Does that bother you?”

James considers for a moment. “No,” he says. “The truth is good. It’s a start.”

Natasha comes in then, probably not by coincidence. She addresses Sam. “We’re good to move, then?”

“Ask him,” Sam says, with an affected shrug.

She turns to James. “You’re with us?” she asks.

“As much as I can be,” James says.

“Good enough,” she says. “We’ll need to rewire your arm.” She pauses, like she’s waiting for him to answer.

“OK,” he says.

“Sam’s taking surveillance on this. Aerial. You and Steve will be on the ground. I’ll be where I need to be.”

“Recon only,” Steve says. “No contact. Don’t engage. If there’s a pattern to who Zola picked, we need to know it.”

“Any connection between the previous two?” James asks.

“Not that I can find,” Natasha says. “Only some proximity, but that may just be a coincidence. No overlapping jobs, acquaintances, experiences, anything. It’s like he pulled them at random.”

“You’re sure the arm knew them?” Sam asks. “Do we have evidence of their supporting HYDRA?”

“The woman in the wheelchair,” James says. “She said ‘Hail’ before she died. She had a pin on her when I - it had a skull. Six tentacles.” He pats himself down; he’d stashed the pin with his battle gear. It seems like an age ago, even if it’d only been about a month. “It was with my coat. I think you took it, that first day.”

“Didn’t find anything,” Sam says.

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” Steve says. 

“Well, we can’t go killing people over _jewelry_ ,” Sam says. “Even that jewelry, if they’re otherwise not a threat.”

“No disagreement here,” Steve says. “We gotta find them first, though.”

It doesn’t take much to rewire his arm. They strap him down for good measure. “You flinch,” Natasha says, with the slightest air of disgust. She goes to work; he can’t really see what she’s doing, but he can feel it, a pins-and-needles feeling like any other set of nerves coming awake.

It’s uncomfortable, in a way James somehow associates with going to the dentist, even though he can’t remember the last time he was at one, not painful exactly, but not pleasant, either.

Steve hovers around until Natasha orders him to sit, which he does, dutifully, near James’ flesh arm.

“Stay out of my light,” she says, and proceeds to twist something that releases whatever mechanism they’d put in that limited his hand movement.

James makes a fist, carefully, finger by finger, then unclenches it. Again, and his fingers are slow and dumb from weeks of being locked up, but he does it again and again until Steve says, “You OK, buddy?”

“Yeah,” he says, and stops.

“Charges are disabled,” Natasha says. She’s wearing jeweler’s lenses for the more delicate electrical work, which make her eyes look huge. “Well, except one.”

“You left a failsafe?” James asks.

“No,” she says. “It was already there. It can’t be disabled without triggering it.” She shrugs.

“Thought so,” James says. “Seems like something they’d do.”

“Stark might be able to undo it,” she says. “He said something about a new arm, too. Once he’d heard we’d brought you in.”

“Probably should leave the failsafe,” he says. “In case, I …”

She nods. “There’s a remote detonation. I have the frequency.” She wipes her hands on her pants, begins to pack her tools. “Good enough for now.”

When they return to the intel room, there’s a map draped on the table like a tablecloth, Sam studying it. “We ready?”

They all turn to James. He ducks his head. “It’s not something I have good control over or anything. The arm does what it wants.”

“Let’s see,” Natasha says, gently.

He stares at the map, fingers dragging over roads he’s never traveled, towns with unfamiliar names. He feels them looking at him, almost can sense Steve’s expectancy, Sam’s skepticism in their gazes.

A few minutes pass, and nothing resolves itself, like looking at some pixelated image that refuses to form a clear picture. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Try again,” Natasha says.

“I, um,” he says. “I think it knows I’m not acting on HYDRA’s behalf.”

“Concentrate,” Sam says. “Not on your arm, just the map. Breathe. Focus.”

He does, takes a big breath from his belly, allows his arm to drift along a highway, the perimeter of a lake.

“Don’t think about finding Zola,” Steve says.

“Yeah, I probably shouldn’t think about the elephant over there in the corner, either,” James says, wryly. “Not thinking about things sure does work.”

He doesn’t see the hit coming, then, just feels the impact of Natasha’s kick on the meat of his ass, takes a sudden, stumbling step forward. His arm, humming steadily since Natasha had fixed it, lurches, suddenly, some gear whining, and his fingers move of their own accord across the map. “Here,” he gasps. “Here.”

When he looks up, Steve is glaring at Natasha while Sam appears to be fighting a smile. “Was that necessary?” Steve asks.

“It worked,” Natasha says, pointing to where James has his finger on the map. “Looks like we’re going to Pittsburgh.”

 

From the top of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building, the city stretches out, two rivers meeting in a third ahead of them, people like ants bustling along. It’s strange to hear so much noise after so long somewhere quiet.

“We could go to a game, maybe,” Natasha says, nodding in the direction of the baseball stadium visible along the north shore.

“Didn’t know you liked baseball,” Sam says.

“I like drinking outdoors.”

He laughs. “Let’s get this done first.” He launches then, one smooth motion of wings and man, gliding out over the city. It’s a cloudy enough day that his wings are stark against the sky.

Natasha goes to one of the building’s glass turrets, sets herself up with a telephoto lens, waits.

Steve has a spotting scope, enough magnification to make out the top of people’s heads.

James’ arm hadn’t gotten more exact on where Zola had been hiding in the city, just that it was in the city proper, and not the outlying suburbs. A start.

They lie together, James surveying the crowd, Steve occasionally adjusting the scope’s settings. His arm is active now, purring and buzzing, the feel of finding the next Zola like a word on the tip of his tongue.

Steve notices, of course. He lies at James’ side in a spotter’s huddle, thighs overlapping, ready to disable James’ arm if the need arises. “Anything?” he asks, when they’ve been watching people come and go for an hour.

“Everyone in this city looks the same,” he says. “Too much black and gold.”

Steve laughs. “We’re gonna be here awhile yet?”

James shrugs. “I don’t know how this works, really. It just _worked_ , before.” The wind blows enough that James is grateful for the heat of Steve’s body next to his. His month with them has made him soft. He looks into the crowds again, sight alighting on a short woman with spiked hair, a dark-skinned man who reminds him of one of the Howling Commandos from the pictures Natasha had shown him, a group of young girls moving as a pack along the sidewalk.

He’s ready to rest his eyes for a few seconds, enough to keep his vision fresh, when he sees the man. Or rather, his arm does.

“Him,” he says, shoving the scope to Steve. “Old man, white hair, three o’clock and moving north.

“You sure?” Steve asks, but James is already up and moving, tracking the man now, arm clanking and vibrating.

His vision goes fuzzy, and then almost red around the edges, blood beating in his head now. The Soldier returns, signals from his arm that push James’ thoughts aside.

He could drop down easily, rappel off the smooth glass surface of the building, kick in a window and take the stairs. A weapon, he’ll need one: The building will have guards, handguns easily obtained, or perhaps something more serious, a locked rifle in a security suite. It doesn’t matter. The specifics are incidental.

The other man on the roof is on him, now, tackling him to the concrete. He’s saying something indistinct that the Soldier doesn’t want to hear. He levers up, feet against his chest, in time for the other man to punch him, once, not hard enough to stop him, a pulled punch. Weak.

“James!”

The Soldier knocks the man aside with his arm, doesn’t have to look to see him go flying. There’s an access door on the roof, a laughable lock on it. He goes to pull it off when the man comes, grabs him into a chokehold, goes falling backwards.

They land on their sides, a quick sharp pain in his ribs, enough that his vision clears for a second. “Steve?” James asks, disoriented.

“Jesus,” Steve says. “You OK? You looked like you were gonna kill that guy, or try to.” He rolls off James, sits up.

It’s enough that his arm resumes clanking, and there’s a pulse from his arm. A reminder of the Mission. Get to Zola. Or _get_ Zola. He’s not sure which.

He’s up and moving again, to the side of the building now, gauging the distance that he’ll have to jump, have to fall.

“Stop!” Steve yells, and he’s tugging at his arm again, the flesh one, brings them both down again. “No killing civilians,” he says, then flips to his comm. “We’ve identified Zola,” he says, giving a description. “I got a tracker on him before -”

He’s up and moving again, slow enough that he can hear Steve go, “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” and tackling him again. “Stay where I put you, OK?”

“I’m going,” he says, rising, bringing himself to full height at the edge of building. It’s a long drop off the side. He’ll probably make it. He’s not sure who’ll jump, but he knows who’ll land, if he does land: The Soldier.

“I can’t let you kill him. I _won’t_. He’s - you’re my friend.” Steve steps between him and the edge, enough to push him back toward the safety of the roof. Steve’s voice is a mix of pity and determination that makes his stomach drop.

He knows who he is: A soldier, a killer, for all the last month has softened him. James, the Winter Soldier: He’s learned to accept the names he’s given. “So stop me,” he says. “Put me down.”

“I won’t do that,” Steve says. “If I don’t have to.”

“Don’t wimp out on me now, Rogers.” He can make the side of the building, leap past Steve with a running start. From there, the Soldier will take over. It feels easy, almost, even though he knows he’ll likely die after he kills this Zola or the next. He can’t find it in himself to care.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Steve says, but he’s back in a fighting stance.

“I’ll kill him. And the others. Civilians, maybe. Taxpayers. Citizens.”

“I won’t let you do that,” Steve says.

“So kill me then. You should have killed me,” he snarls. “You should have let me die.” He lunges at Steve then, with his flesh arm first. They didn’t give him a gun - wise, in hindsight. But he can kill with his hands.

Steve is quick, so quick, up on the balls of his feet, like a boxer, turning each time he tries to land a hit.

“Fuck you,” he hisses. “Fight me.”

“No,” Steve says.

“Fuck you. It’s not your choice. It’s not your fucking choice.” And then he’s not trying to punch Steve, but dives at him, goes down in a pile with him against the roof.

Steve is fighting back now, landing blows on his sides, one sharp one between his shoulders. He tosses him like he’s a sack of potatoes, goes to straddle his legs, force him over into a wrestling hold.

He catches a glint of her hair as she takes cover on higher ground on the far part of the roof. She has a tranq gun, probably. She could knock both of them out like they’re big game and haul them back if she has to.

Steve notices his distraction, tries to use it to control his arms, get him calm. His metal arm is having none of it, and he strikes Steve, hard, catching his neck and face, again against the meat of his arm.

“C’mon!” he screams, when Steve just turns to spit blood from where his lip splits, only to return to the job of trying to subdue him.

“No,” Steve says. “We’re not doing this. No. We have a mission.” He slams a hand against the flesh arm, his shoulder, an attempt to pin him. “Get in, get intel, get out. Remember. _Remember_.”

He rolls his hips, enough to dislodge Steve, who’s up and in a fighting stance, shield off and ready to throw at him. “Let’s go,” he says, motioning with his metal hand.

Steve rolls his eyes, feints a punch left, enough of a telegraphed move that he follows, hits Steve in his side, another punch aimed at his face that Steve stops by grabbing his hand and pulling him forward.

“Bucky, stop!” Steve shouts at him. “You’re not this. You have a choice.”

They go over together. This time, he takes the brunt of it, bracing himself with his flesh arm and feeling his wrist give way.

“Are you done?” Steve asks, slamming him against the hard ground. 

He thrashes in Steve’s grip, enough that Steve puts his full weight into him, to give one final hit to his solar plexus, enough to knock the wind out of him. He turns, coughing, stomach heaving.

“Stay down,” Steve growls.

James does. His head feels clearer now, body aching in all the places Steve hit him. His arm is quieter, vision sharper. Whatever had been clouding his mind - the arm, HYDRA, always fucking HYDRA - recedes.

The need to get up, move, go after Zola doesn’t clear, though. Perhaps this is his Mission, its message like tentacles in his brain. Perhaps it isn’t.

There’s shouting in the background, Steve calling Sam and Natasha over comms, the thump of Sam landing on the roof, Natasha’s quiet entry a minute later.

“He good?” he hears her ask.

“Think so,” Steve says. “Got it?”

“Of course,” she says.

He hears her walk toward him, steps lighter than Steve’s or Sam’s. A hand enters his vision, reaching for his metal arm. “Up,” she says. “We gotta go.”

He lets himself be pulled to his feet.

 

That night, he dreams of Brooklyn, of Steve. He’s on a high rooftop, watching people bustle along, men in brimmed hats, women’s lips painted bright contraband red. It sounds like his city, voices in accents that sound harsh, nasal, shoes against pavement, children running in the streets.

He sees Steve, not as he is, but as he was, scrawny inside a too-big suit. He’s carrying a portfolio, smiling, making his way up the road.

James has a gun, a rifle, something too high power to be from before the war, night-vision sight. He likes this gun. It’s killed for him before. He crawls on his belly to the edge of the roof, brings the rifle up, checks the wind blowing through laundry out on the lines.

The shot isn’t hard to line up, Steve’s route predictable. The rifle is a familiar weight in his hands. But both his arms are flesh, his hands soft, or softer than they were before the war. He looks down at himself, expecting to see his battle gear or fatigues. Instead, he’s wearing his civilian clothes, wide-leg trousers and a short-sleeve shirt, the kind he kept meticulous care of, to make all the girls in Brooklyn smile at him, some of the boys too.

Steve pauses to watch a game of stickball, laughing at something one of the kids says, dropping his portfolio to chase after one of the balls that has rolled away.

It’s not a hard shot to line up, but he can’t seem to still his hands, trembling like it’s cold, even though he can feel the sun warm on his back.

Steve returns, lobbing the ball to one of the boys, smiling, leaning to pick up his portfolio. He looks easy, warm weather kind to his asthma, the various aches in his bones.

He takes the shot as Steve stands up, two to center mass, one hitting his shoulder, the other low on his belly, a killing shot, if not immediately then eventually. Steve crumples to the ground, and James yells, throws down the rifle and races down the stairs, down down down, staircase after staircase, more stairs than could possibly be in the building, more than James has ever run down.

He’s gasping for air, legs like rubber, and he pauses on one of the landings to catch his breath, hands on his knees. When he looks down, both his hands are metal, covered in blood.

There’s a deep sharp pain in his gut, and when he brings his hand to it, he feels the entrance wound, the hole where he’s taken a bullet.

“Bucky!” Steve is on the staircase with him now, looking big and small all at once, so big, but he’s trying to tug James from where he’s crouched, and he can’t move him. He’s too heavy. “We gotta go. C’mon.” He’s insistent, like James is just being difficult rather than bleeding out on the staircase.

He yanks at James’ hand, but the blood proves too slick, and he can’t seem to find purchase. Steve tries his arm next, his leg, then a finger inside his bullet wound, once, like it will cajole James into moving. Finally, he gives up, disappears into the stairwell, bloody footsteps, shoes squeaking against the risers.

James musters the strength to drag himself over to the edge of the landing, vision going fuzzy and then dark at the edges as he watches Steve disappear.

“James!”

He wakes in his room, on his cot, Steve next to him, face pale.

“I remember,” Bucky says. “How things were. Sort of. How you used to - I killed you. In my dream. I killed you. You were so small back then.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and he puts a hand to Bucky’s face. His cheeks are wet.

“I killed you,” Bucky says again, voice hoarse. He must have been screaming. “It was that first summer you were at art school, when you used to carry that damn portfolio everywhere.”

“You remember?” Steve asks, and there’s wonder in his voice, the kind that makes Bucky’s heart leap. He sits beside Bucky on the cot, hands on his sides, the edge of one on Bucky’s arm, warm.

“I - I mean.” He shakes his head. “Some things. That portfolio. The way the tenement roof looked at dawn. We used to sleep up there, right, when the weather got too hot? Or when …”

“My ma,” Steve says. “Before the TB got really bad. She didn’t want me to catch it when she was coughing up a storm. Sent us up to ‘go camping’ on the roof.”

“I remember,” Bucky says. “It was fall, and it got cold some nights. We had to huddle for warmth. Woke up with your freezing nose in my armpit.”

“James, I -” Steve says, but his voice shakes, and Bucky has to reach for him, gather him like he remembers doing that night, so long in Brooklyn.

It makes something ache in his chest, to hold Steve this way, the way his brain provides a picture, blurry as it is, of doing this before. He tries to think of another memory, another time he and Steve were like this, or something of Brooklyn, his life, but all he gets are blank spaces, smears, like words that won’t come into focus on a page, frustrating for how close they seem.

“It’s Bucky, OK?” he says, sometime later, into Steve’s hair.

Steve turns to at him. His eyes are red-rimmed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “You bet, pal.”

 

“I saw you tried to fight Steve,” Sam says, moving his pawn coolly. He opens with the same attack half the time, a feint. Bucky hasn’t learned not to fall for it.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “He pretty much kicked the shit out of me.”

“You got him in the face too,” Sam says. “He was icing it earlier. Must have been some fight.”

“I just - I got angry,” Bucky says, shrugging. “My arm went off, and Steve went to try to stop me, and I just got so angry at him for, I don’t know, letting me live.”

“Good,” Sam says.

“Good?”

“Anger is good.” He advances a pawn into Bucky’s territory.

“You want me to fight Steve?”

Sam laughs. “Didn’t say that. Just, anger, acknowledging you should be angry. That’s good. That’s _healthy_. Who the fuck wouldn’t be angry with what you’ve been through?”

Bucky collects the intruding pawn, begins waging an attack on Sam’s knights. He favors them, Bucky’s noticed.

“Why’d you kill, before?” Sam asks.

“Orders.” He shrugs.

“Soldiers kill on orders. You went after Steve because you got mad at him. Not saying that’s a good response, but it’s a more honest one than thinking everything’s A-OK or that this shit will work itself out. That’s the kind of anger you never really let go of.”

“You’re still angry?”

Sam’s smiling - he always seems to be, at least with Bucky. Not that shit-eating grin Howard always had or Steve’s wry little smirk, but an open smile, one that doesn’t flicker when he says, “Yeah, always. Just, there’s a limit to how productive I can be with it. So I try something else.”

He picks up a rook, considers it, puts it down. “My mom’s a teacher. 30 years, New York Public Schools. She could go another 10, too, Except the past few years, her MS got so bad that she couldn’t stand any more, couldn’t hold a pen. I asked her, when she got sick, if she was angry.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘of course I’m angry, just can’t decide who I’m angry at,’” Sam says. “I know you all -” and he waves a hand to indicate Bucky and Steve and Natasha, probably, “like to be _epic_ , but not everything’s got to be global.”

“I know who I’m angry at,” Bucky says. He levels a glare at Sam, who just shakes his head. Bucky probably deserves that.

“Yeah? That’s a luxury some of us don’t get,” Sam says. “But I’ve been to that edge, I know what it looks like. And what it’s like to pull back.”

“And you’re gonna help me with that?”

“If you’re ready for that, then yes, I am.”

Bucky considers the board in front of him, the fact that Sam will win in eight or nine or ten moves, considers the bed he’ll sleep in that night, the smallness of his life right now. Considers Natasha, watching them, alert always. The hand up she’d offered him when Steve had put him down. Considers that, Steve will be there, bruised as he is, to wake him if he screams in his sleep. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m ready.”

 

“While you two were … otherwise occupied,” Natasha says. “I got intel on our new Zola.”

“What Nat means is that while you were playing ultimate fighter on the roof, she got enough photos that we could run them through facial recognition. We cross-checked them against CCTV data to track his movements, then compared those to his movements prior to being ‘Zola-fied,’ and ran them against similar data from the other Zolas,” Sam says. He cocks an eyebrow at Steve and Bucky. “Don’t even ask how we got the DNA and protein samples.”

Steve, at least, has the good sense to look slightly embarrassed.

“Anyway,” Natasha says. “Looks like you were right, James. He is Zola. The initial neuropathy analyses confirm it. There seem to be many copies of him.”

“How?” Steve asks.

“He’s wiped them and uploaded himself,” Sam says, spinning a paper file around to show them, flipping through to aerial pictures of this Zola, printouts marked with test results that Bucky doesn’t understand.

“He knew you were going to find the storage room. These people are _backups_. There’s enough of the original person there to mask it, but this guy definitely did enough of a ‘hail HYDRA’ act that we can be sure. Probably. We’re waiting on test results from Stark Labs.”

“Are they - can it be undone? There must be some way to reverse it,” Steve says.

“Not everything broken can be fixed, Steve,” Natasha says. Still, she types furiously on the pad, code streaming past on the monitor too fast for the Bucky to track.

“You can’t believe that,” Steve says. He’s standing now, pacing. He looks at Bucky now, then at the wall pinned with information on the other Zolas, the ones the Soldier killed. “Otherwise -”

“We’re looking into it,” Sam interrupts.

“Could we,” Steve says, voice rising, “wipe them or I don’t know the word? Put them back.”

“A person isn’t a computer,” Natasha says. “We can’t just reinstall the operating system.”

“But maybe we can jog their memory or something -”

“This sounds like a better conversation for Tony Stark,” Sam says. “Not us.”

“You’re right,” Steve says, deflating. He sits at the table, sighing heavily. “It is a bigger conversation.”

“I looped in Fury,” Natasha says. “He’ll get the info to Stark and Banner. Foster, possibly, too. Figured sending it directly might get some interest from parties we’d otherwise want to avoid.” She folds open the case to her iPad, brings up a file, sliding it to Steve.

He pulls it into his lap so that Bucky can’t see what’s written on it, just Steve’s face illuminated by the glow of the screen.

“What if we can’t restore them?” Bucky asks, quietly, a few minutes later.

Sam and Natasha look up simultaneously from the files they’d been reviewing, then at Steve.

“We’re estimating, based on population density and geography, that there are hundreds of them, thousands, maybe,” Natasha says.

“Too many to eliminate,” Bucky says.

“Not an option,” Steve says, voice firm. He gets up, puts the iPad back on the table, resumes his pacing. “We’ll find some other way.”

“There isn’t always another way,” Bucky says. He can feel anger rising in him, the same anger that made him fight Steve on the roof. He’s clenching his fists, feeling his metal arm engage, preparing the Soldier to fight again.

“I have to believe there is, Buck,” Steve says, stepping toward him.

It would be easy to flip the table, to break a chair across his back. He won’t fight back. Sam and Natasha would be tougher.

“We can keep arguing about this,” Sam says, stepping between them, speaking slowly. He places a hand in the center of Bucky’s chest. “Or we can wait until Stark and Banner have done their scientist stuff and actually make an informed decision. Not ideal, but it’s what we got.”

Steve closes his eyes, sucks a breath through his nose. “You’re right, Sam. Thank you.”

“Now take yourselves upstairs, so Nat and I can run contingencies without it resulting in a brawl.”

They smoke out on the porch, or Bucky does, and Steve sits nearby, drinking a cup of coffee.

It’s mid-morning, mist burning off to reveal a bright clear day. From the porch, he can see the lawn sloping down, a stand of trees, some rolling hills in the distance. “Where are we, anyway?” he asks. It’d been dark when they’d driven to Pittsburgh, and he’d spent most of the trip asleep, waking to find himself drooling on Steve’s shoulder.

Steve gives him a surprised look. “West Virginia,” he says. “Near the Ohio border.”

“Never been here before.”

“I have,” Steve says. “During the war. We toured all over.” He gives a slight, wry smile at that. “It’s nice, I guess.”

“Quiet,” Bucky says.

Steve shrugs. “Never was much for the quiet life. Always seemed like there was too much to do.”

“If I got up, now,” Bucky says. “And left - didn’t harm anyone, just up and went to go live out my days in some town, what would you do?”

“Probably tell you not to take the front entrance,” Steve says, taking a sip of coffee. “It’s mined.”

“Just like that, you’d let me go?” Bucky says.

“It’d hurt,” Steve says. “If you started - if HYDRA picked you up, or if something else happened, I’d come after you. But if you really, honestly, want to go, I’m not stopping you, either. Probably catch hell from Sam and Nat.”

Bucky takes one last drag on his cigarette, grinds it into the ashtray that appeared soon after he’d taken up smoking again. “Probably hard to keep a low profile, what with the arm.”

“You’re not a low profile kind of guy, Bucky,” Steve says. “Never were. But you’re not a prisoner here. We agreed to that before we came after you.”

“What do think they’re going to find?”

“Who knows, especially with Tony in the mix. Whatever it is, we’ll need to act soon,” Steve says. Steve gets up, stretches, popping his back. “I was going to go train. If you want to come, I’d appreciate a sparring partner.”

“Thought we weren’t supposed to be punching each other,” Bucky says, but he’s up and moving.

“Oh, you think you can land a hit now?” Steve teases.

In the training room, Steve neatly removes his socks and shoes, his shirt, gestures for Bucky to do the same.

They circle each other on the mat, Steve light on his feet, waiting for an opening. Bucky has a brief flash of doing something similar, back in New York, teaching Steve to fight, maybe, or at least not get whooped as bad.

Steve takes advantage of his distraction now, lunges, takes him to the mats, tumbling over, though not with enough force to keep Bucky from springing up again.

“That all you got, old man?” Bucky says, and Steve laughs and lunges again, this time knocking Bucky on his ass.

He twists in Steve’s grip, rolls them over so he’s on top, ignoring the stirring in his belly that says it’s been a long time since he’s done this with another person, much less one he actually likes. A long time since he’s been close to another person’s body without it meaning pain for one of them. The opposite of that, now, in fact.

Steve kicks up his legs, rolling up so that Bucky goes falling backward, though he’s able to turn it into a roll and land more or less on his feet.

“Again,” Steve says, and this time Bucky charges, sending them both over. His shoulder clips Steve in the chin, and he’s about to apologize when he notices Steve is smiling as he tries to work his way out from under Bucky’s body.

From there, it devolves into attack and counterattack. Steve is fast, strong, his body gymnastically impossible, slippery with sweat. He fends off Bucky, not without effort, and soon Bucky is occupied with reasoning how to take Steve down, reacting to Steve doing the same. His legs burn, and his flesh arm, the joints of his shoulders, his cock starting to come awake.

Steve pins him, then, thigh between his, and Bucky slaps the floor, saying ‘Uncle!’ before it goes much farther. He finds himself grinning at Steve, Steve grinning back.

After, they lie panting on the mats, looking up at the blank ceiling. Steve catches his breath first, rolls over to his side, gestures to Bucky’s metal arm.

“Can you feel with it?” Steve asks.

“Touch, somewhat. Temperature. Pain,” Bucky says.

“Fine motor skills?”

“Sure,” he says, shrugging. “I do a lot of crochet.”

Steve laughs. “But this?” he asks, and runs a light finger over Bucky’s metal palm where his hand is resting against his stomach.

Bucky shakes his head.

“Pressure?” Steve digs his thumb in now, hard, the way Bucky remembers doing for him when he’d been drawing for hours in their underheated apartment and his hands got cramps.

“It feels - I can feel it. But it’s not ...”

“The same,” Steve fills in.

Bucky shakes his head. “No, it’s not. I don’t think it will be.”

“After the serum,” Steve says. “I was worried. About my art, selfishly.” He chuckles, and Bucky laughs with him. “I broke three pencils before I got my grip right again. Had to adjust it. Was like learning to ride a bike again. Which I had to learn again, too.”

Bucky removes his hand from Steve’s grip, gently, and flexes his fingers. His hand clicks and whirrs as he does. “This ain’t three pencils, Steve,” he says.

“I know, it’s just,” Steve says. “You’ll learn again. Or figure it out. I’m sure.” He’s got that Captain America face on, the one that makes Bucky want to haul him over, give him a noogie, and remind of the time he puked on a lady’s hat on the Cyclone at Coney Island. He does none of those things, especially when he looks more closely, and sees that Steve’s eyes are wet.

“I’ll try,” he says. He finds he could mean it.

Steve smiles.

 

“Stark says there could be a way,” Natasha says. “But there is the matter of backups. It appears the Zolas aren’t wiped, simply transferred. If we obtain their memories, we can perhaps restore them.” She pauses then, meaningfully. “It appears HYDRA was in the business of removing, not destroying, memories.”

“Does that mean -?” Steve asks, before Bucky can really process what she said.

“It’s possible,” Natasha says, turning to Bucky. “We may find your files. We may not. No way to know. As for restoring them, Stark wasn’t clear on how that could work. The Zolas are completely transferred. Selected files may prove more difficult.”

“Any intel on where HYDRA might have stashed that kind of information?” Sam asks.

“We’ll check the usual places,” Natasha says. “Zola seems to have a penchant for decommissioned military bases. As good a place to start as any.”

They identify five possible targets, Sam and Natasha tackling the bulk of the recon work, effectively banishing him from the briefing room.

“They’re afraid I’ll panic if they come across my files,” Bucky says. He’s playing chess with Steve, Steve doing his best to not pretend he had Bucky beaten five moves ago. “They’re not wrong.” He shrugs.

“And if we do?”

“Had enough of HYDRA in my head for a lifetime,” Bucky says. “Two lifetimes, actually.” He moves a pawn carelessly, watches as Steve swipes it with his rook.

“I went to see Peggy,” Steve says. “She’s alive, in a nursing home. Beautiful as ever. She - she doesn’t remember me, Buck. Between one visit and the next. Even during visits. It’s like seeing me for the first time.”

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky says. “I’m sorry. That’s rough.”

“If I could do anything, _anything_ , to give her those memories back, I would.”

Bucky reaches a hand out, his flesh one, lays it near Steve’s. “It’s not the same, Steve, and you know it. Who knows what other garbage HYDRA has in there? It’s not worth it, to me.”

“I miss you,” Steve says.

“I know, Steve. I know.”

 

They have to blast their way in to the third base they search, two charges on the main doors, another set on the hidden doors they find in the subbasement. “So much for under the radar,” Sam mutters.

The place is deserted, a layer of dust everywhere, office furniture in weird earth tone colors. “Sectors,” Steve says, and they go to toss the place.

Minutes later, Steve holds up two drives, both too clean to have been sitting since the ‘60s, sleek and modern with a set of color-coded cables hanging off of it. HYDRA marks on them. “Looks like likely candidates.”

Natasha plugs the first into the CPU she’d brought, rolling out a little flexible keyboard, fingers quick as she scans lines of code. “Yahtzee,” she says. “Our Zolas, helpfully cataloged by Social Security number.”

She disconnects it and plugs in the second. A file marked in Russian pops up on the screen, with one of the aliases Bucky recognizes as them having given him. “I think this might be -”

“Burn it,” Bucky says, before she can even offer.

“Are you -” Steve begins.

“I’m sure,” he says. “Burn it, crush it, put it under a train or a drill press, I don’t care. Just get it the fuck away from me.”

“We should, perhaps, think this through,” Natasha says. Her voice is excessively even. A warning.

“What Nat said,” Sam says. “This doesn’t come with an undo button.”

“It’s _mine_ ,” Bucky says. And despite the skull marking, the HYDRA brand stamped all over this place, he knows it to be true. “It’s mine, and it’s my choice.”

“It is your choice,” Steve says. “But we should, maybe, let cooler heads prevail. Sam’s right. We can’t reverse this. No harm in waiting.”

The roof, helpfully, caves in.

 

“We need to start using doors,” Sam says, wiping concrete dust from his face. “Doors are underrated.”

Steve hauls a piece of rubble off himself, casually tossing a chunk of a cinder block over his shoulder. “Agreed on the ‘using doors’ plan.”

Even Bucky can feel the ache in his shoulder from digging himself out.

They all collapse, gasping for breath, in the warehouse wreckage. Sam and Natasha lean against one another, passing a bottle of water between them. Natasha takes a swig, spits, hands the bottle to Sam, who does the same.

“You get ‘em?” Sam asks, then takes another drink, spits gray water on the ground in front of him. “Because I didn’t just swallow half a building for nothing.”

Steve holds up the hard drives. “All here.”

“Good,” Sam says. “Stark’ll be waiting for it. They’re doing some alpha testing before they try doing the personality reboots, but his and Banner’s projections say it should be doable.” He pauses, gives Bucky a meaningful look. “Are we sending all of the files? Nat was supposed to be at the drop point -” he looks at his watch-less wrist “about 2 hours ago.”

“No,” Bucky says.

“Buck -” Steve begins.

“My choice, Steve,” he says. “Said so yourself.”

Natasha rises, brushing dust from her clothing, shaking out her hair. She takes the hard drives from Steve. “I’ll send the others. Safe house later. Cover me, Sam.” She makes for wherever she has her vehicle stashed.

“You heard the lady,” Sam says. “Looks like I’m on aerial duty. I’ll leave you two to -” He reaches over to where the pack with his wings sits, puts it on with one smooth motion. “You know what, just work your shit out, OK? I’ll be back later.” He slides his goggles on, adjusts a few belts and buckles, then launches into the sky.

The drive back to the safe house is tense, Steve with his hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, back straight. If it weren’t for the dust coating his hair and face, he’d look like a recruitment poster.

Bucky slouches in the passenger seat, smoking out the window, ignoring Steve’s disapproving glare when he gets ash on the center console.

“Those things’ll kill you,” Steve says.

“I have super-powered healing,” Bucky says. “Or haven’t you heard.”

“Buck, I-” Steve begins.

“I don’t want to talk about this now,” Bucky says. He leans forward, flips the radio dial until it blares some kind of music that grates on his hearing. He leaves it on.

They’re pulling into the entrance road to the house when Bucky finds it in himself to speak. “I’ll never be him again, you know. The man you knew.”

Steve sighs, pulls the keys from the ignition. “Inside,” he says. “Or at least not here.”

The porch feels like neutral ground. Steve doesn’t sit, just stands, closer than he normally would.

“That’s not me,” Bucky says. “They took those things from me. I … they took memories when I’d defy them, or when I tried to escape. I don’t want them now. They’re not _mine_ anymore. I’m sorry. I know you wanted him back, but I can’t -” and his voice breaks.

“Bucky, I -” But Steve stops, then moves closer into Bucky’s space. “Is this -?” he asks, putting his arms around Bucky. It’s good, familiar from the nights he’s woken up screaming, familiar from before, even if he can’t quite remember.

“I can’t be him, Steve. Those memories - I can’t be what you want me to be,” he says. I’m sorry.” He tightens his arms around Steve, feels Steve do the same.

“I know,” Steve says, against his neck. “I just wanted you to come back to me.”

“I have,” Bucky says. “As much as I can.”

Steve considers something, pulls away a little. Bucky can feel his gaze on his mouth, his neck. There’s something hot in it, something Bucky has no memory of, or maybe no memory of Steve looking at him that way, even if he’d occasionally, foolishly, looked at Steve like that.

“What were we to each other?” Bucky asks. “I mean, before.”

“Not,” Steve says. “Not like that. I-” he pauses, gasps. “I’m selfish, Buck. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wanted a friend, a - I couldn’t let you go. I couldn’t live in a world without you. I’m sorry.”

He’s crying now, not like when he really got whaled on by the neighborhood bullies, the kind of tears he cried late at night, that first night after his mother’s funeral, as he lay next to Bucky in bed, all bony knees and translucent skin stretched across his ribs.

Bucky remembers that, the way his breath hitched like he was going to go asthmatic, the way he’d tried to suck deep lungfuls of breath, but let out rattling coughs instead. He remembers the way Steve’s feet had been cold against his legs, the way he’d tried to keep a brave face on, always, only to break down against Bucky’s shoulder. He’s crying now.

And Bucky, damn it, Bucky cries with him.

 

Natasha finds him in the backyard later that night. He’s digging a hole, a ranger grave. He considers sleeping in it, like he did that first night on the run, a defensible position. He looks around, though, at the stand of trees Steve rigged with motion sensors, at the area alarms the house is wired with, and decides against it.

She doesn’t say anything, just picks up one of the shovels he found stored under the porch.

“Probably should fill this in,” he says.

She nods.

They work for a while like that, the only sounds their breathing and night-birds calling.

“You shot me,” Natasha says. “I don’t know if you remember that.”

“I’m -”

“Don’t apologize,” she says. “It healed. There’s a scar. I don’t mind.” She pauses, considers something. “Sam doesn’t seem to mind, either.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, feeling momentarily dumb. “ _Oh_.”

She presses her lips together in amusement, continues to take little scoops of dirt from his pile and toss them into the hole he’s dug. “There’s always an ‘after.’ So long as you choose to stay alive,” she says. “I’ve learned to make the most of it.”

“You think I could have that, with Steve?”

She shrugs. “Not for me to say. Your choice.”

“Can you love someone, be loved,” he asks. “With all the things you’ve done?”

She considers a moment. “Love is for children,” Natasha says, finally. She lifts her shovel, and turns a spade-full of dirt into the hole.

He pauses, leans on his shovel and wipes a gloved hand across his forehead. “We were children, once, him and me,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, not unkindly. “You were.”

They continue, filling the grave with soft wet earth. A quiet night, not like the kind he grew up with, just stars and crickets, the smell of grass.

“I could stay in a place like this,” he says, after his human arm has tired, after Natasha has developed a thin sheen of sweat across her forehead.

She snorts. “I’d die here,” she says. “Rot away to nothing.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

She takes the shovel from him, lays it down next to the now-filled in hole. “Come on,” she says. “We’ve kept them waiting.” She reaches for his hand, the metal one, her hand small in his. He lets himself be led back to the house.

Sam and Steve are in a living area that Bucky hasn’t been in before. There’s baseball on TV, Pirates at Brewers from the look of it, Steve half-watching as Sam and he play cards.

There are beers on the table, water condensing on them, and Natasha takes one that Sam offers to her. Their hands brush. Bucky feels a little foolish for not noticing before.

He reaches for one, unopened, an unfamiliar brand, popping the cap off with his metal hand.

“Nice feature,” Sam says.

They play hearts, then five-card stud, three down, two up. Natasha’s poker face is, unsurprisingly, impeccable. Sam’s is as well.

At one point, his smile falters minutely, a tell, Bucky thinks, a two and nine face up, and two cards hidden. Two more cards dealt, and Bucky goes all in - pledging a week’s chores, including a grocery trip that Steve is unlikely to let him go on alone. Bucky holds most of a straight, a three, four, six and seven, with the four and six showing.

“Think you’re gonna get lucky?” Sam asks, tossing two more of the paper clips they’re using to wager in the center.

“I’m a lucky guy,” Bucky says. His next card is a queen, useless, and it must show in his face.

“Ready to fold?” Sam says.

“Probably should,” Bucky says.

Steve and Natasha already have, and are paying more attention to the hurt the Pirates are putting on the Brewers, Steve explaining something about a rules change and Natasha doing her best to look interested in the particularities of ‘40s baseball. One of the Pirates batters is up, puts it over the far fence, and Natasha’s out of her seat cheering.

Bucky watches Sam watch her.

Sam notices, gives a sharp grin. “Folding or are you in?”

“I’m in,” Bucky says.

Sam flips his cards. “Two pair, nines high,” he says.

“Shit.”

“Sorry, son. Looks like I’m off milk-run duty for the time being.” The baseball game has ended, now, a walk-off apparently, and Natasha appears at the table. “Not off other duties, it looks like,” he says, and he laughs as she pulls him from the table and back toward their quarters.

“Guess it’s just you and me,” Steve says. “We could,” - he gestures to the cards on the table. “Or there’s another game on, if you want.”

Bucky glances at the TV. Dodgers at Giants. “Weren’t they also in New York?” he asks.

“Don’t know if you noticed, Bucky, but the world’s changed,” Steve says, face purposefully grave.

Bucky laughs. “You’re such a jerk, you know that?”

“Someone might’ve told me a time or two,” Steve says. “I was gonna have another.” He points to the beer. “Want one?”

“Something a little stronger, maybe? It’s been a long day.”

Steve pours them both generous doses of whiskey.

Bucky doesn’t drink it fast enough to truly get drunk - another thing they took from him - but enough to feel nicely warm. They settle on the couch together, Steve pressed against him, more or less watching baseball. The sound of a high laugh comes in from the other room.

“They seem happy,” Bucky says.

Steve smirks. “Yep,” he says, taking a drink. There’s a long silence, another noise, and Steve turns up the volume on the TV.

“Do you think we could -” Bucky says, and he takes a gulp of whiskey, savoring the burn. Some things don’t change. “I don’t know if I can be who you want me to be. I don’t know who’ll be in my head when I wake up tomorrow.”

“It’ll be you,” Steve says.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you,” Steve says. “And you’re not your arm. Your programming. You’re stronger than that.”

“You _can’t_ know that. If I go back, if I fall, I gotta know you’ll stop me. Kill me if you need to, or let Sam or Nat do it. Promise me.”

“I can’t,” Steve says, voice serious. “I can’t promise to give up on you. Never could.”

And he’s leaning forward, into Bucky’s space, and this, this Bucky can understand, at least. Steve’s mouth is warm, lips soft, and Bucky for a minute wonders if the serum did that too, before kissing Steve again. The couch squeaks under them, springs complaining, and they fall onto the carpeted floor.

Whatever reservations Steve had before, they seem to have evaporated, hands on Bucky’s neck, and back, insistent, demanding. He gets a hand in Bucky’s hair, tugging, and then bites at his mouth. Things get rougher from there, a haze, Bucky’s vision going pleasantly blurred, until Bucky finds himself straddling Steve’s hips, shirtless, grinding down as Steve grinds up against him.

“Thought about this,” Steve gasps. “Before the war. Back in Brooklyn.”

“Yeah?” Bucky asks. “What about?”

“Doing this,” Steve says, and he rolls them over. “You used to come back, covered in lipstick, smelling like ladies’ perfume. Wanted whatever those dames got. ”

“And what was that?”

“Having you inside me.”

“Well, look at that,” Bucky says, and he leaves a suck mark on Steve’s neck. It’ll fade, but he watches the impression his teeth left anyway. “Little Steve Rogers, all grown up.”

“I know what I want,” Steve says, and he stands up, reaches for Bucky’s metal arm to pull him up. “I’ve learned not to wait.”

Bucky takes Steve’s hand and, for the second time that night, lets himself be led.

They don’t make it to Bucky’s room, or Steve’s.

Steve ends up stretched across the briefing table, legs spread, map crumpling under him. He’s beautiful, of course, perfect in a way that almost defies understanding, until Bucky sucks a bruise right under one of his nipples and listens to Steve laugh through it. “Ticklish, there,” he says, then moans when Bucky scratches a set of lines down his chest.

They make do with spit and fingers, Steve muttering something about the war and rationing as Bucky fucks into him. “C’mon,” he goads, and Bucky can’t help but respond. It’s good, if desperate, Steve louder than he probably should be, the table cracking at one point, and they drop to the floor.

Steve’s impossibly flexible, and Bucky’s grateful for that, and for Steve’s stamina and for the way he mouths Bucky’s name again and again, like he’s beyond words.

Bucky doesn’t lose himself, tries to cling to clear parts of his mind, the roll of a drop of sweat off Steve’s forehead, the dig of his knees on the hard floor. He doesn’t lose himself except right at the end, when it’s all too much, pleasure zinging around his circuitry, and when he topples forward, Steve is there to catch him.

 

“It’s selfish, I know,” Steve says, when they’re lying in bed together later, not Bucky’s cot, but a real bed in Steve’s quarters, Bucky smoking a cigarette. “I just wish you could have all those times back, all those memories. I just want something to be easy for you.”

“But you wouldn’t take the easy road, if it was you,” Bucky says. He ashes into a glass on the bedside table.

“Didn’t say I was being logical,” Steve says. “Don’t know if I can be, when it comes to you.”

“Memories’ll come back,” Bucky says. “Or they won’t. I have to make my peace with that. I just haven’t, yet.” He stubs his cigarette against the glass in time for Steve to roll so that he’s draped across Bucky’s chest.

Steve traces the edge between Bucky’s shoulder and metal arm. “Nat says Fury wants us in Berlin. They’ve found evidence of a HYDRA nest, possibly, or at least enough to be worth investigating.” He pauses, presses his mouth to Bucky’s neck. “You with us?”

“You know the answer to that one,” Bucky says. “Always have.”


End file.
